Headingley in June is a ground that does not forgive batters who play at everything, and Gill had been, until this innings, a batter who played at everything. This had been the criticism, and it had been a fair criticism, and it had been levelled at him by people who had played the game and by people who had not, and both groups had been right. The Gill who walked out to bat on the second morning, after Rahul had fallen to a Broad outswinger that was, in Broad’s last summer, exactly the Broad outswinger you expected, was not the Gill of the previous four Tests.
What Changed, And When
He had spent the ten days before the series at the National Cricket Academy in Bengaluru, working with Vikram Rathour, who had been brought back as a consultant after the Australia tour and who had, according to Gill, told him one thing and one thing only. The thing was: the ball you leave is the ball you have played. This is not a new thing to say to a batter. Rathour had said it to Gill before. Gill had nodded then. The difference, this time, was that Gill had spent two hours in the nets leaving balls, and Rathour had made him do it with a camera behind the stumps, and had shown him, between every leave, the position of his front foot and the position of his head and the position of his hands, and had pointed out that the three were not aligned on the balls he left, and that the three were aligned on the balls he drove.
The innings on the second morning was built on that. He left the first eleven balls he faced. He left four of them that he would have played at, two months ago, and that he would have been caught at slip off, and that the slip cordon had been set for, and that the slip cordon was visibly frustrated by. By the time he played his first scoring shot, a push for two into the off side off Anderson, he had faced thirteen balls, and he had shown the dressing room, and the slip cordon, and the camera behind the stumps, that the work had been done.
The Hundred, And The Balls After It
He reached his hundred with a cover drive off Leach that went all the way, the cleanest shot he played all day, and the shot that told you the leave had not caged him. The cover drive is the shot that Gill has always had, the shot that the selectors saw when he was nineteen and that made them pick him, the shot that has never been the problem. The problem was the balls he played at to get to the cover drives. The hundred was the first overseas hundred, and it was the hundred that, had it come two years ago, would have saved him a year of being the player everyone was waiting for and nobody was sure of.
He was out for one hundred and twenty-eight, caught at point off a Robinson short ball that he pulled, and that he would tell you, if you asked him, that he should have left, and that he knew he should have left the moment it left the hand. That is the innings. The hundred and the dismissal, together, are the player. The player is good. The player has always been good. The player needed to leave the ball, and he has now learned to leave the ball, and the next two years will tell you whether that is enough.
